GOP embraces natural immunity as substitute for vaccines

By ANTHONY IZAGUIRRE

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks to supporters and members of the media before a bill signing Thursday, Nov. 18, 2021, in Brandon, Fla. DeSantis signed a bill that protects employees and their families from coronavirus vaccine and mask mandates. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara)


TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Republicans fighting President Joe Biden’s coronavirus vaccine mandates are wielding a new weapon against the White House rules: natural immunity.

They contend that people who have recovered from the virus have enough immunity and antibodies to not need COVID-19 vaccines, and the concept has been invoked by Republicans as a sort of stand-in for vaccines.

Florida wrote natural immunity into state law this week as GOP lawmakers elsewhere are pushing similar measures to sidestep vaccine mandates. Lawsuits over the mandates have also begun leaning on the idea. Conservative federal lawmakers have implored regulators to consider it when formulating mandates.

Scientists acknowledge that people previously infected with COVID-19 have some level of immunity but that vaccines offer a more consistent level of protection. Natural immunity is also far from a one-size-fits-all scenario, making it complicated to enact sweeping exemptions to vaccines.

That’s because how much immunity COVID-19 survivors have depends on how long ago they were infected, how sick they were, and if the virus variant they had is different from mutants circulating now. For example, a person who had a minor case one year ago is much different than a person who had a severe case over the summer when the delta variant was raging through the country. It’s also difficult to reliably test whether someone is protected from future infections.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in August that COVID-19 survivors who ignored advice to get vaccinated were more than twice as likely to get infected again. A more recent study from the CDC, looking at data from nearly 190 hospitals in nine states, determined that unvaccinated people who had been infected months earlier were five times more likely to get COVID-19 than fully vaccinated people who didn’t have a prior infection.

“Infection with this virus, if you survive, you do have some level of protection against getting infected in the future and particularly against getting serious infection in the future,” said Dr. David Dowdy of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It’s important to note though that even those who have been infected in the past get additional protection from being vaccinated.”

Studies also show that COVID-19 survivors who get vaccinated develop extra-strong protection, what’s called “hybrid immunity.” When previously infected person gets a coronavirus vaccine, the shot acts like a booster and revs virus-fighting antibodies to high levels. The combination also strengthens another defensive layer of the immune system, helping create new antibodies that are more likely to withstand future variants.

The immunity debate comes as the country is experiencing another surge in infections and hospitalizations and 60 million people remain unvaccinated in a pandemic that has killed more than 770,000 Americans. Biden is hoping more people will get vaccinated because of workplace mandates set to take effect early next year but which face many challenges in the courts.

And many Republicans eager to buck Biden have embraced the argument that immunity from earlier infections should be enough to earn an exemption from the mandates.

“We recognize, unlike what you see going on with the federal proposed mandates and other states, we’re actually doing a science-based approach. For example, we recognize people that have natural immunity,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican who has been a chief critic of virus rules, said at a signing ceremony for sweeping legislation to hobble vaccine mandates this week.

The new Florida law forces private businesses to let workers opt out of COVID-19 mandates if they can prove immunity through a prior infection, as well as exemptions based on medical reasons, religious beliefs, regular testing or an agreement to wear protective gear. The state health department, which is led by Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who opposes mandates and has drawn national attention over a refusal to wear a face mask during a meeting, will have authority to define exemption standards.

The Republican-led New Hampshire Legislature plans to take up a similar measure when it meets in January. Lawmakers in Idaho and Wyoming, both statehouses under GOP-control, recently debated similar measures but did not pass them. In Utah, a newly signed law creating exemptions from Biden’s vaccine mandates for private employers allows people to duck the requirement if they have already had COVID.

And the debate is not unique to the U.S. Russia has seen huge numbers of people seeking out antibody tests to prove they had an earlier infection and therefore don’t need vaccines.

Some politicians use the science behind natural immunity to advance narratives suggesting vaccines aren’t the best way to end the pandemic.

“The shot is not by any means the only or proven way out of the pandemic. I’m not willing to give blind faith to the pharmaceutical narrative,” said Idaho Republican Rep. Greg Ferch.

U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican and physician, along with 14 other GOP doctors, dentists and pharmacists in Congress, sent a letter in late September to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, urging the agency, when setting vaccination policies, to consider natural immunity.

The White House has recently unveiled a host of vaccine mandates, sparking a flurry of lawsuits from GOP states, setting the stage for pitched legal battles. Among the rules are vaccine requirements for federal contractors, businesses with more than 100 employees and health care workers.

In separate lawsuits, others are challenging local vaccine rules using an immunity defense.

A 19-year-old student who refuses to be tested but claims he contracted and quickly recovered from COVID-19 is suing the University of Nevada, Reno, the governor and others over the state’s requirement that everyone, with few exceptions, show proof of vaccination in order to register for classes in the upcoming spring semester. The case alleges that “COVID-19 vaccination mandates are an unconstitutional intrusion on normal immunity and bodily integrity.”

Another case, filed by workers of Los Alamos National Laboratory, challenges their workplace vaccine mandate for civil rights and constitutional violations, arguing the lab has refused requests for medical accommodations for those workers who have fully recovered from COVID-19.

A similar lawsuit from Chicago firefighters and other city employees hit a bump last month when a judge said their case lacked scientific evidence to support the contention that the natural immunity for people who have had the virus is superior to the protection from the vaccine.

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Associated Press Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard contributed to this report.

Why Moderna won't share rights to the COVID-19 vaccine with the government that paid for its development


Ana Santos Rutschman, Assistant Professor of Law, Saint Louis University
Fri, November 19, 2021,

The U.S. government funded a significant portion of the R&D behind the Moderna vaccine. Peter Endig/picture alliance via Getty Images

A quiet monthslong legal fight between the U.S. National Institutes of Health and drugmaker Moderna over COVID-19 vaccine patents recently burst into public view. The outcome of the battle has important implications, not only for efforts to contain the pandemic but more broadly for drugs and vaccines that could be critical for future public health crises.

I teach drug regulation and patent law at Saint Louis University’s Center for Health Law Studies.

Moderna recently offered to share ownership of its main patent with the government to resolve the dispute. Whether or not this is enough to satisfy the government’s claims, I believe the dispute points to serious problems in the ways U.S. companies bring drugs and vaccines to market.

US was a major funder of the Moderna vaccine

Vaccines have played a crucial role in the response to the pandemic.

In December 2020, Moderna became the second pharmaceutical company after Pfizer to obtain authorization from the Food and Drug Administration to market a COVID-19 vaccine in the United States. People have since grown so used to talking about the “Moderna vaccine” that a crucial element in the history of how it was developed risks being overshadowed: Moderna was not the sole developer of the vaccine.

Unlike many of the other pharmaceutical companies involved in the COVID-19 vaccine race, Moderna is a newcomer to drug and vaccine commercialization. Founded in Massachusetts in 2010, the company had never brought a product to market until the FDA authorized its COVID-19 vaccine last year.

Throughout the 2010s, Moderna focused on the development of mRNA technology, attracting over US billion in funding from pharmaceutical companies and other investors. It went public in 2018.

Even before the pandemic, research on both coronaviruses and vaccine candidates against emerging pathogens was a priority for agencies operating in the public health space. In 2015, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an institute within the NIH, signed a cooperative R&D agreement with Moderna on basic research, including the development of new vaccines. The agreement resulted in an undisclosed amount of funding and assistance with research.

In addition, after the COVID-19 outbreak began Moderna also

received almostThe U.S. government funded a significant portion of the R&D behind the Moderna vaccine. Peter Endig/picture alliance via Getty Images

A quiet monthslong legal fight between the U.S. National Institutes of Health and drugmaker Moderna over COVID-19 vaccine patents recently burst into public view. The outcome of the battle has important implications, not only for efforts to contain the pandemic but more broadly for drugs and vaccines that could be critical for future public health crises.

I teach drug regulation and patent law at Saint Louis University’s Center for Health Law Studies.

Moderna recently offered to share ownership of its main patent with the government to resolve the dispute. Whether or not this is enough to satisfy the government’s claims, I believe the dispute points to serious problems in the ways U.S. companies bring drugs and vaccines to market.
US was a major funder of the Moderna vaccine

Vaccines have played a crucial role in the response to the pandemic.

In December 2020, Moderna became the second pharmaceutical company after Pfizer to obtain authorization from the Food and Drug Administration to market a COVID-19 vaccine in the United States. People have since grown so used to talking about the “Moderna vaccine” that a crucial element in the history of how it was developed risks being overshadowed: Moderna was not the sole developer of the vaccine.

Unlike many of the other pharmaceutical companies involved in the COVID-19 vaccine race, Moderna is a newcomer to drug and vaccine commercialization. Founded in Massachusetts in 2010, the company had never brought a product to market until the FDA authorized its COVID-19 vaccine last year.

Throughout the 2010s, Moderna focused on the development of mRNA technology, attracting over US$2 billion in funding from pharmaceutical companies and other investors. It went public in 2018.

Even before the pandemic, research on both coronaviruses and vaccine candidates against emerging pathogens was a priority for agencies operating in the public health space. In 2015, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an institute within the NIH, signed a cooperative R&D agreement with Moderna on basic research, including the development of new vaccines. The agreement resulted in an undisclosed amount of funding and assistance with research.

In addition, after the COVID-19 outbreak began Moderna also received almost $1 billion in funding from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, which operates within the Department of Health and Human Services. This funding was specifically targeted to the development of a COVID-19 vaccine candidate.

Researchers have calculated that, collectively, the U.S. government has provided $2.5 billion toward the development and commercialization of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine.
US, Moderna scientists working side by side

In addition to providing financial support, the federal government was instrumental in the development of Moderna’s vaccine for other reasons. Namely, federal scientists worked alongside Moderna scientists on different components of the vaccine.

These contributions included working on dosing mechanisms, and the NIH said federal scientists created the stabilized spike proteins that are a key component of the vaccine made by Moderna.

The importance of the role played by federal scientists in their work with Moderna would soon become apparent. A 2019 agreement with a third party explicitly acknowledged this, alluding to mRNA vaccine candidates “developed and jointly owned by NIAID and Moderna.” And by late 2020, the U.S. government was calling it the “NIH-Moderna COVID-19 vaccine.”

While the U.S. government has spent money on COVID-19 vaccines made by other companies, its close involvement in the R&D stages of Moderna’s sets it apart.
How it became a patent dispute

As development of the vaccine progressed, Moderna applied for several patents, each one covering different components of the vaccine. U.S. law allows inventors to apply for patents on products or methods that are new, not obvious and useful. While some early modern vaccines – like the polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk’s team – were not covered by patents, from the late 20th century onward it became very common for one or multiple patents to cover a newly developed vaccine.

In applying for some patents related to its vaccine, Moderna named National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases scientists as co-inventors alongside Moderna scientists. This was the case, for example, in a patent application dated May 2020 for a relatively minor component of the vaccine.

However, in July 2021, Moderna made it clear that it would not name government scientists as co-inventors in a patent application covering a much more significant component of the vaccine: the mRNA sequence used to produce the vaccine, known as mRNA-1273.

Moderna’s position was that Moderna scientists alone had selected the sequence. The company informed the Patent and Trademark Office of its position in a 2020 statement.

In November 2021, government officials publicly challenged the company’s decision after months of failed negotiations with the company. Moderna then took to social media to defend its position, tweeting:

“Just because someone is an inventor on one patent application relating to our COVID-19 vaccine does not mean they are an inventor on every patent application relating to the vaccine.”




By contrast, the National Institutes of Health argued that three NIAID scientists – Kizzmekia Corbett, Barney Graham and John Mascola – had meaningfully contributed to the invention, though they’ve declined to publicly specify how. If true, patent law says they should be named co-inventors.

But this dispute is not merely about scientific principles or technical aspects of the law. While patents are also regarded as proxies for measuring scientific reputation, their most immediate and powerful effect is to give patent holders a significant amount of control over the covered technology – in this case, the main component of the vaccine made by Moderna.

From a practical perspective, excluding federal scientists from the application means that Moderna alone gets to decide how to use the vaccine, whether to license it and to whom. If, by contrast, the government co-owns the vaccine, federal patent law allows each of the joint owners to engage in a variety of actions – from making and selling the vaccine to licensing it – without the consent of the other owners.

This is especially relevant in cases of product scarcity or potential pricing issues in connection with the commercialization of the vaccine. For instance, the U.S. would have the ability to allow more manufacturers to produce vaccines using the mRNA-1273 technology. In addition, it could direct vaccine doses wherever it likes, including to lower-income countries that have received few vaccines so far.

Broader implications

A graphic shows how its mRNA technology works

The ongoing battle between the government and an emerging star in the pharmaceutical industry is yet another episode in a complicated relationship between actors with complementary yet distinct roles in the production of drugs and vaccines.

On the one hand, the federal government has long played a critical role in both performing and funding basic research. On the other, it does not have the resources and capacity to bring most types of new drugs and vaccines to market on its own.

The pharmaceutical industry thus plays an important and necessary role in drug innovation, which I believe should be rewarded – although not boundlessly.

If the NIH is correct about co-ownership of the vaccine, then Moderna is unduly using a legal tool to achieve a position of market control – a reward it does not deserve. This position of sole control becomes even more problematic in light of the significant amounts of public money that funded the development of this vaccine. This offset some of Moderna’s financial risk, even as the company projects to make $15 billion to $18 billion in revenue from vaccine sales in 2021 alone, with much more expected in 2022.

However, even if the NIH prevails in the patent dispute, it is important to understand the limitations of such a “win.” The U.S. would be in a position to license the vaccine, for example, and could do so by requiring that licensees agree to equitable distribution of vaccine doses.

But co-ownership would not enable the government to fix any of the other problems that currently affect the manufacturing and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, such as scaling up production or building infrastructure to deliver vaccine doses.

In my view, the dispute is a reminder of the many problems embedded in how vaccines are made and delivered in the U.S. And it shows that when taxpayers fund basic research of a drug, they deserve more of the control – and rewards – when that drug succeeds.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Ana Santos Rutschman, Saint Louis University.

Read more:
US vaccine rollout was close to optimal at reducing deaths and infections, according to a model comparing 17.5 million alternative approaches

How mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna work, why they’re a breakthrough and why they need to be kept so cold

Ana Santos Rutschman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

A majority of Gen Z investors think crypto will make them millionaires, new survey shows


Isabelle Lee
Sat, November 20, 2021

Getty Images


The majority of Gen Z investors think crypto will make them millionaires, a recent study by Engine Insights showed.


"This generation has a greater acceptance and comfort with all things digital," an expert told Insider.


"They feel that everything financial is harder for them than it was for previous generations," an expert said.

It sometimes seems crypto is minting new millionaires by the day, particularly those with the stomach to dabble in the risky world of altcoins. The most famous of these — like doge and shiba inu — have produced some eye-watering returns in 2021.

It's no surprise then that investors are flocking to the space with dreams of quick riches, and Gen Z investors in particular think crypto will make them millionaires, a recent study by data analytics firm Engine Insights showed.

Nearly two thirds — 59% — of Gen Z respondents to the survey believe they could become wealthy by investing in cryptocurrencies.

"This generation has a greater acceptance and comfort with all things digital, so not surprising that would be more comfortable with crypto," Kathy Sheehan, SVP at Cassandra, a division of Engine Insights, told Insider. "This generation has a lot of concerns about debt and finances."

A confluence of factors, from the rising costs of real estate to college education could be to blame, Sheehan told Insider. Inflation reaching 30-year highs has only reinforced the appeal of crypto as the weakening of fiat money dominates headlines.

"They feel that everything financial is harder for them than it was for previous generations," Sheehan said. "Couple that attitude with more of an appetite for risk, it is not surprising that they are hoping for a quick fix or return."

Gen Z, a group of about 72 million people in the US born between 1997 and 2012, is the most diverse generation in American history in terms of race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.

Broadly, this generation is progressive, pro-government, and activist-minded. They have also grown up in a period of watershed cultural moments including #MeToo and the post-George Floyd era, weathering a disruptive global pandemic on top of it all.

The survey, whose findings are based on responses from 1,027 people in November, also found that if offered $2,000 to invest, Gen Z respondents are three times more likely to buy digital assets compared to baby boomers, and twice as likely to consider virtual currency a "legit currency."

The crypto market has fluctuated wildly this year, but has generally been trending higher. The crypto market capitalization hit $3 trillion recently.

Bitcoin has gained 100% since the start of the year, while ether is up 480%. Meme coins have had it better, with dogecoin rising 4,835% year-to-date and shiba inu skyrocketing 63,490,000%.

Many retail investors poured multiple rounds of government stimulus checks into stocks and crypto, helping fuel the surge in both markets seen during the pandemic.

Read the original article on Business Insider

Why Republicans Can’t Stop Talking About Masculinity

Katelyn Fossett
Sun, November 21, 2021

Republican lawmakers and hopefuls seem particularly interested in the idea of masculinity lately. In a TV interview earlier this month, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley claimed the left was telling men their “masculinity is inherently problematic.” He also told interviewer Mike Allen he would make masculinity a signature political issue.

Hawley’s comments sounded similar to those of Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, who went viral last month in a video calling on mothers to raise their sons to be “monsters.” Today’s culture, Cawthorn said, is trying to “demasculate” all young men “because they don’t want people who are going to stand up.” More recently, Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance sounded similar themes in a series of tweets in which he defended Kyle Rittenhouse, the 18-year-old who was acquitted on Friday of all charges in the shootings of three men in the aftermath of demonstrations in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Vance tweeted that the trial filled him with “indescribable rage.” “We leave our boys without fathers. We let the wolves set fire to their communities,” he continued. “And when human nature tells them to go and defend what no one else is defending, we bring the full weight of the state and the global monopolists against them.”

According to historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez, this way of talking about masculinity has its roots in conservative evangelical spaces, but it’s going mainstream. Du Mez wrote a book last year called Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, about how the model of masculinity in evangelicalism went from emulating the qualities of Jesus to emulating those of the actor John Wayne, and how that has shaped culture and politics ever since. Hawley, Vance and Cawthorn all have deep ties to evangelical Christianity and frequently reference the importance of faith in their lives and, especially for Cawthorn and Hawley, in their political philosophies. I spoke with Du Mez about the history of masculinity as an idea in Republican politics and why it’s suddenly so popular. This conversation has been edited and condensed.


Katie Fossett: When you heard these comments from Hawley and Vance recently, given your background and what you study, what did you hear?

Kristin Kobes Du Mez: I’ll start with Hawley. Within conservative evangelical spaces, first of all, there is the idea that masculinity is a God-given thing. When Hawley is talking about an attack on men and saying that the left is attacking manhood and that they hate this country and don’t believe in gender … all of that sounds very familiar. In white evangelicalism, this has been a refrain for decades now. In evangelical spaces, Christian manhood has long been equated, particularly in conservative circles, with a kind of rugged, militant quality.

Since the 1960s, conservative evangelicals have elevated a more militant ideal of masculinity, one that is both provider and protector. And they have argued that God has created man to fulfill these roles: He’s filled men with testosterone to give them strength, and that testosterone makes them aggressive and they need to channel that aggression for good. That is their God-given duty as men. And so when I heard Hawley talk about courage and independence and assertiveness, that is very similar to how masculinity is discussed in evangelical spaces. Although often rather than assertiveness, they substitute aggressiveness.

This is a kind of reactionary masculinity that emerges in the 1960s and 1970s in conservative evangelical spaces and more broadly in American conservatism. And the context here is important. Coming out of the postwar era, there was the baby boom, and traditional family values were all the rage, at least among the white middle class. Then you have this disruptive moment in the 1960s. You have the civil rights movement, which is particularly disruptive in the American South to the status quo. And you have the early feminist wave and second-wave feminism in the 1960s — full-swing in the 1970s — and very importantly, the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement.

All of these things are seen to destabilize the social order, and conservatives are particularly concerned. And in all three of these cases, it’s the assertion of white, patriarchal authority or power that can restore order. They believed feminism was threatening to emasculate American men, which was leaving the nation weak and unable to defend itself against communism. The anti-war movement — all those hippies, men with long hair, “make love, not war” — was leaving the nation imperiled. The civil rights movement, as well, was seen as a threat. In the American South, particularly to white families, the integration of schools was seen as a threat to white children.

Against that backdrop, this kind of restoration of a rugged American manhood becomes not just popular, but politicized in a very partisan way.

Fossett: Why is this happening now? Is this language around masculinity becoming more useful in political messaging?

Du Mez: I think it is becoming more useful in the wake of the Trump years. Because, of course, it was around before. There’s a lot of history, particularly of Republicans, unfavorably comparing Democratic men and masculinity against a stronger, more rugged American manhood. It kind of had a resurgence during the Obama presidency. It was very popular for Republicans to impugn his masculinity and to question his manhood and his strength. Both men and women did this; Sarah Palin went after him in this respect. It certainly isn’t something entirely new.

But I think that Trump definitely intensified it, because when you look back to the 2016 Republican primary season, Trump appeared on the stage and nobody really knew what to do with him, but he was able to play into this idea of rugged masculinity, this warrior masculinity, more effectively than any of the other candidates. Most Democrats thought it was laughable.

But he was reckless. He was uncivil. He was crass. He was not going to be cowed by political correctness. He was a bully on a debate stage against other Republicans. And it worked for him. It made him look strong, and it made his opponents look weak. And so you saw them trying to gain the upper hand and try to play that game, but none of them could play it as well as he could because he was completely unrestrained. And I think that because that worked so well, it seems to me that’s the playbook, certainly for anybody who wants to take up Trump’s mantle.

And then you have J.D. Vance’s comments about the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. I think one thing that’s important to note is that this rugged masculinity and this conservative vision of American manhood, historically, have been closely linked to Christian nationalism. “We need a strong man who can step up and defend America,” and in terms of Christian nationalism, “defend Christian America.”

When I read Hawley’s speech from the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, on the one hand, he’s praising this group of African-American men who stepped up and brought order to a high school in Louisiana after reports of fighting on campus. On the other hand, he’s also linking the left’s attack on manhood with their ideas of systemic racism and structural oppression. All of those ideas he sees us as a threat to America and a threat to, as he calls it, our shared culture, which would really resonate, particularly with his conservative white base. When we look at Vance, he uses some coded language to talk about the “lawless thugs.”

Fossett: I saw a Madison Cawthorn speech from a recent event make the rounds on social media a few weeks ago that seems to fit this pattern.

Du Mez: Yes. In that speech, he called on mothers to raise their young men to be monsters. It’s so similar to Hawley’s message; he was arguing that culture was trying to “demasculate” our young men, and it — presumably the left — is doing that because it didn't want young men to stand up to it. This resonates with what Hawley was saying, too; he accused the left of sort of trying to make men tolerant and compliant.

It’s really important to situate this call for a rugged militant masculinity within a political context, which is the fight against the left. Both Hawley and Cawthorn have participated in calls to “Stop the Steal,” and Cawthorn actually gave one of the addresses on January 6th, just before the Capitol insurrection. He’s also gone on record talking about how bloodshed will be inevitable if our elections continue to be rigged. So it’s a call to action for young men to have the “backbone,” as he puts it in that speech, to stand up and to fight back to defend our liberty at all costs. And he even goes on to say: “There's nothing I would dread more than picking up arms against a fellow American.” But essentially, that’s where things are headed, he’s saying.

There was a Public Religion Research Institute American Values Survey that came out recently. In that survey, we see that 60 percent of white evangelicals believe the election was stolen. Of those, 39 percent believe that violence might be necessary to save the country. So that’s what we’re talking about here.

What is also relevant here is that both Cawthorn and Hawley appear to be drawing on the work of Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist and YouTube personality. I think that “monster” quote from Cawthorn is drawing on Peterson in particular. Peterson is sending the same message to young men that they need to be responsible; they need to be assertive; they need to be aggressive. As he puts it, “If you’re harmless, you are not virtuous.” And men need to be monsters. That’s his word; the hero has to be a monster. He needs to be a controlled monster. But you need to have that danger — that capacity for danger — and then you learn how to control that. Otherwise, you will be too weak to stand up to the oppressors.

So both Hawley and Cawthorn seem to be influenced by Peterson’s message, or at least it resonates with them. And Peterson is extremely popular with conservative white men, and young, disaffected men, and so there’s a lot of overlap between conservative white evangelical men and fans of Jordan Peterson. Hawley and Cawthorn seem to be tapping into both of those streams and bringing them together as a political call to action.

Fossett: And Vance’s comment [about Rittenhouse] ties into this, too.

Du Mez: Yeah. He’s saying: This was a young white man who stepped in when others failed, and when the government failed, and acted to use violence to assert order. And that absolutely fits in with this call to action to defend our liberty at all costs. And like Hawley said, it might require bloodshed.

FBI Agents Became CIA Operatives in Secret Overseas Prisons

Carol Rosenberg
Sat, November 20, 2021

The FBI headquarters in Washington, Nov. 14, 2021. (Stefani Reynolds/The New York Times)

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — In the torturous history of the U.S. government’s black sites, the FBI has long been portrayed as acting with a strong moral compass. Its agents, disgusted with the violence they saw at a secret CIA prison in Thailand, walked out, enabling the bureau to later deploy “clean teams” untainted by torture to interrogate the five men accused of conspiring in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

But new information that emerged this week in the Sept. 11 case undermines that FBI narrative. The two intelligence agencies secretly arranged for nine FBI agents to temporarily become CIA operatives in the overseas prison network where the spy agency used torture to interrogate its prisoners.

The once-secret program came to light in pretrial proceedings in the death penalty case. The proceedings are examining whether the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 plot, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and his four co-defendants voluntarily confessed after years in the black site network, where detainees were waterboarded, beaten, deprived of sleep and isolated to train them to comply with their captors’ wishes.

At issue is whether the military judge will exclude from the eventual trial the testimony of FBI agents who questioned the defendants in 2007 at Guantánamo and also forbid the use of reports that the agents wrote about each man’s account of his role in the hijacking conspiracy.

A veteran Guantánamo prosecutor, Jeffrey D. Groharing, has called the FBI interrogations “the most critical evidence in this case.” Defense lawyers argue that the interrogations were tainted by the years of torture by U.S. government agents.

In open court Thursday, another prosecutor, Clayton G. Trivett Jr., confirmed the unusual arrangement, in which nine agents were "formally detailed" to the agency “and thus became a member of the CIA and worked within CIA channels.”

He said that the agents served as “debriefers,” a CIA term for interrogators, and questioned black site prisoners “out of the coercive environment” and after the use of “EITs.”

EITs, or enhanced interrogation techniques, is a CIA euphemism for a series of abusive tactics that the agency used against Mohammed and other prisoners in 2002 and 2003 — tactics that were then approved but are now illegal. They include waterboarding, painful shackling and isolating a prisoner nude, shivering and in the dark to break his will to resist interrogation.

Trivett offered no precise time period but made clear that the FBI agents were absorbed by the CIA sometime between 2002, when the black sites were established, and September 2006. On their return to the FBI, they took on the status of CIA assets, he said, and so their identities are classified.

Five of the nine agents had roles in the interrogations of some of the defendants in the case, Trivett said, and their names have been provided to defense lawyers on the basis that they not be disclosed.

The FBI declined to comment on the arrangement, as did the CIA.

A defense lawyer, James G. Connell III, added more details in the same court hearing.

He said that the nine agents “stopped being FBI agents and became CIA agents temporarily” under a memorandum of understanding that established a different arrangement than the more typical assignment of a representative of one law enforcement agency to work out of the organization of another.

A former CIA historian, Nicholas Dujmovic, said there was a precedent for “taking employees from another government agency and quickly making them CIA employees for specific functions.”

In the 1950s, the CIA transformed U.S. Air Force pilots into CIA employees during their stints flying U-2 spy planes and then returned them to the Air Force without the loss of seniority or benefits. “President Eisenhower thought it was important that U-2s not be piloted by U.S. military pilots,” Dujmovic said. The process was called “sheep dipping,” he said.

Earlier testimony showed the FBI participating remotely in the CIA interrogations through requests sent by cables to the black sites seeking certain information from specific detainees, including Mohammed after he was waterboarded 183 times to force him to talk.

The pretrial hearings are in their ninth year and the military judge, Col. Matthew N. McCall of the Air Force, is the fourth judge to hear testimony at Guantánamo. In arguing over potential trial evidence, the prisoners’ lawyers have repeatedly accused prosecutors of redacting information that the defense needs to prepare for the capital trial. In the military commissions, prosecutors are the gatekeepers of potential trial evidence and can withhold information they deem not relevant to the defense’s needs.

In one example, Connell showed the judge a November 2005 cable the FBI sent to the CIA that contained questions for three of the defendants while they were in a black site — out of reach of the courts, lawyers and the International Red Cross.

The FBI released the cable to the public this month under an executive order by President Joe Biden to declassify information about the FBI investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Connell had earlier received a version of the same cable from prosecutors. But it was so redacted that it obscured the fact that the FBI wanted Mohammed and the other defendants questioned in the black sites.

Trivett sought to play down the disclosure of the FBI-CIA collaboration as routine business at a time when the U.S. government was devoting tremendous resources to investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. “This is not some big bombshell,” he told the judge.

A lawyer for Mohammed, Denny LeBoeuf, cast the collaboration as part of a conspiracy to portray FBI accounts of interrogations of the defendants at Guantánamo in 2007 as “clean team statements,” a law enforcement expression.

“They were never clean,” LeBoeuf said. “Torture isn’t clean. It is filthy. It has sights and sounds and consequences.”

© 2021 The New York Times Company

NGO: 1,149 Palestinian Minors Detained by Israel This Year

TEHRAN (FNA)- Israeli forces have detained 1,149 Palestinian children since the beginning of this year, according to a Palestinian rights group on Saturday.

The Palestinian Prisoners Society made the announcement on the occasion of World Children's Day, Anadolu news agency reported.

The NGO said most of the detained children have since been released, but 160 of them are still languishing in the Ofer, Damoun and Megiddo prisons.

At least two-thirds of the arrested children were subjected to some form of physical torture, according to the statement, while all of them were exposed to psychological torture during detention.

Since 2000, Israel has arrested at least 19,000 Palestinian minors aged between 10 to 18 years old, according to the NGO.

World Children's Day is celebrated globally on the 20th of November every year with the aim of raising awareness about children’s rights and to promote policies that will improve their well-being.

 

Low Income and No Prospects for Education: 12-Year-Old Opens Up About Child Labour in Gaza

© AFP 2021 / Thomas Coex

Elizabeth Blade

SPUTNIK

In 2018, nearly 5,000 children aged 10 to 17 were involved in full-time labour in Gaza, but the official numbers are believed to be much higher because there are many kids below the age of 10 who are not registered.

Mohammed Doghmosh, a 12-year-old Palestinian from Gaza, remembers vividly the moment his mother told him he would need to go to work.

"I was seven back then. My father died in a car accident and my mum told me that from that moment on I would be the one responsible for my family of eight siblings", said the boy.

"So I didn't go to school, I needed to feed my family, and I started working instead", he added.

Tough Days

Mohammed started roaming around the streets of Gaza with his donkey, approaching customers and suggesting they buy his vegetables.

Recalling those days, Mohammed says he was fearful of what the future would hold for him.

"I cried a lot during those days because I didn't know how to control such a big animal as a donkey. Also, I was shy and didn't know how to approach adults and suggest they buy my products".

But he managed to curb those fears and keep going.

"The first weeks were exceptionally difficult for me", says the boy. "I remember the gazes people gave me. Many felt pity for me. They looked at me as if I was a beggar and they gave me more money as charity. It hurt my feelings and I decided to be a man".

Palestinian children pose for a photo at the Jebaliya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, Thursday, May 14, 2015.

© AP Photo / Adel Hana

With time, Mohammed says he has become more professional. He now earns $26 per day, something that not only enabled him to replace his donkey with a horse, but also helped him to keep his family afloat.

"I sacrificed my studies so that my siblings could go to school. I am paying for their daily expenses and I hope that they will finish their education and will be able to get good jobs in the future".

Child Labour is Common

Mohammed is not the only Palestinian child who has been forced to go to work to ends meet.

According to official statistics, in 2018 nearly 5,000 children aged 10 to 17 were involved in full-time labour in Gaza. Additionally, 1,490 children held down jobs while attending school.

Yet, the numbers are believed to be much higher, specifically because there are many working children below the age of 10 who haven't been properly registered.

The outbreak of COVID-19 in the Palestinian territories in February 2020 has only made the situation worse. The shutdown of private businesses and the closing down of the Strip forced many Gazans into unemployment. And that subsequently pushed the poverty rates even higher.

Mohammed is extremely frustrated with the current situation, and he blames the Hamas government for the mess.

"They don't seem to care about ordinary people. Neither do they cater to the needs of poor families, those who lost their fathers, and those who are forced to work hard to make ends meet".

Hamas, an Islamic group that assumed control over the Gaza Strip in 2007 after a violent coup, has long been blamed for the dire economic situation in the Strip.

Palestinians shop for traditional Ramadan lanterns for the month of Ramadan, at the main market in Gaza City, Wednesday, May 16, 2018

© AP Photo / Adel Hana

Sporadic protests against the group have been taking place in the enclave since 2019. Those protests - organised by the movement Bidna Naish (Arabic for We Want to Live) - have recently reemerged, with people calling on Hamas to take action in order to improve the lives of ordinary Palestinians.

Mohammed says he is not taking part in those protests. His job consumes most of his time, leaving him very few options for rest.

But he is hopeful that the situation will improve and he has dreams for the future.

"I hope that one day I will be able to open my own vegetable market instead of relying on animals for the distribution of my products. I also hope that one day I will be able to study and achieve something in life".

U.S. acknowledged the killing of civilians in Syria, but justified it

By TOC On Nov 14, 2021

WASHINGTON – The United States has admitted to bombing the Syrian city of Baghuz in 2019, killing at least 80 people, most of them women and children, but justifying the actions of its military, learned BulgarianMilitary.com, citing Tabu.bg and the New York Times.

War in Syria: Who controls what and what happens

According to the data on March 18, 2019, an American F-15E attack aircraft dropped two bombs in the Baghuz area – the first one weighing 227 kg, and then another weighing 907 kg. on a crowd consisting mostly of women and children.

The newspaper noted that the US military recognized this bombing for the first time, which recognition came in response to an inquiry. The United States says the bombing killed at least 80 people, but at the same time says the attack was justified because the 16 extremists in the crowd were killed. The Pentagon also said it was unclear whether the others were civilians or militants, as Islamic State women and children are also known to be armed.

The newspaper writes that the representative of the Central Military Command of the USA, Bill Urban, claims that the army has conducted an internal investigation into the mentioned bombing.

“We hate the death of innocent people and take all possible measures to prevent them. “In this particular case, we have reported and investigated the attack according to our evidence, and we take full responsibility for the involuntary loss of life,” Urban said in a statement.

At the same time, according to the New York Times, an independent investigation has never been conducted, although a lawyer with the U.S. Air Force has reported to management and the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee the deaths caused by the bombings. He (the legal officer) qualified the incident as a war crime.

An employee of the Air Force’s Inspector General told the New York Times that he thought the military wanted to cover up the case. “Management seems determined to bury him. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with it. It makes you lose faith in the system when people try to do the right thing, but none of the leaders want to hear you,” he said.

TABU recalls that on October 23 this year, according to a statement issued by the US Central Command, one of the leaders of the terrorist group Al Qaeda, Abdul Hamid al-Matar, was killed in an airstrike in northwestern Syria.

The civil war in Syria

The Syrian civil war has been going on for almost a decade. Attempts by movements such as the Syrian Democratic Forces to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have failed.

The Syrian democratic forces are armed by allies and the United States, while the Syrian army is armed mainly by Russia. Russia is the only country officially invited to Syria by President Bashar al-Assad.

In 2017, the United States launched a massive missile strike on Bashar al-Assad’s forces after a report emerged that the Syrian president had used chemical weapons to attack his people in the country. Syria and Russia deny such actions.

During his tenure, US President Donald Trump decided to withdraw much of US troops from Syria, leaving several troops to guard Syria’s oil fields on the pretext of “falling into the hands of Islamic State.”

With the withdrawal of the United States, Turkey comes to the fore, declaring it necessary to deal with the Kurds and the PKK movement in the northern part of the country, which borders Turkey. That is why Erdogan is sending troops in an attempt to build a stable and secure 30km zone between Syria and Turkey, which will prevent future terrorist attacks on Turkish territory, as it is.

Ceasefire

In February 2020, Turkey lost at least 62 troops killed in Syria. Nearly 100 soldiers were wounded, Syrian-backed forces destroyed dozens of Turkish armored vehicles, and more than ten drones, including drones, were shot down. Washington has repeatedly accused Moscow of involvement in the deaths of Turkish soldiers, Russia rejects these allegations.

In early March 2020, the presidents of Russia and Turkey, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, agreed that a ceasefire came into force in the Idlib de-escalation zone. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad later said that if the US and Turkish military did not leave the country, Damascus would use military power.

The reason for the Russian-Turkish negotiations was a sharp aggravation of the situation in Idlib, where in January, a large-scale offensive by the Syrian army against the positions of the armed opposition and terrorists began.

Government forces recaptured nearly half of the Idlib de-escalation zone and left behind several Turkish observation posts. After that, Ankara sharply increased its military contingent in the region and launched the operation “Spring Shield” to push the Syrian troops. Militants are loyal to Ankara and support Turkey.

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